Development of a battery emulator test system for BMS reliability testing

Abstract

This document reports the development of a battery emulator system based on an empirical battery model, built for testing the reliability of Battery Management Systems. Its software is mainly based on MATLAB/SimuLink platform, while the hardware function is mainly implemented via Arduino Mega microprocessor development board. The system built is capable of performing its required task of emulating a battery’s discharge curve. Further, the system is very flexible - it can be scaled to emulate large battery packs and extended to emulate other discharge curves under different conditions as well, for example, different battery chemistries, different discharge rates, and so on.

The HIL System offers the flexibility to add new functions without much extra work, and can be adapted to test different Battery Management Systems as required.

This work needs to be expanded further to actually model the reliability of a Battery Management System, but it provides a platform for developing test suites to perform this testing. In the future, the BMS needs to be tested using techniques such as accelerated ageing, and stress testing on the hardware side and on the software side, boundary value black-box analysis, statement coverage and other methods described. Suitable models will need to be used to evaluate and assess the reliability of the same.

The current system is obviously not perfect. It has a few limitations and weaknesses that have been described in the report.